A group of Mohawk women are hoping to stop bulldozers from working on a former Montreal hospital that they believe could hold the truth about the fate of indigenous children who disappeared 60 years ago in Canada.
For two years, Quebec provincial government has been trying to delay the McGill University construction project.
“They took our children and did all kinds of things to them. They were experimenting on them,” Kahentinetha, an 85-year-old activist from the Mohawk community of Kahnawake, southwest of Montreal, told AFP.
The activists base their claim on records and testimony suggesting the site contains the unmarked graves of children who were hospitalised at the Royal Victoria Hospital and the Allan Memorial Institute, a neighbouring psychiatric hospital.
In the 1950s and 1960s, behind the austere walls of the former psychiatric institute, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funded a human experimentation program called MK Ultra.
During the Cold War (1947-1991), the program aimed to develop procedures and drugs to effectively brainwash people.
In this regard, experiments were carried out in Great Britain, Canada and the United States, subjecting people (including indigenous children in Montreal) to electroshocks, hallucinogenic drugs and sensory deprivation.
“They wanted to erase us,” says Kahentinetha.
A leading figure in the indigenous rights movement who has already travelled to Britain and the United States to denounce colonialism, he describes this fight as “the most important of (his) life”.
“We want to know why they did this and who is going to take the blame,” he said.
Sniffer dogs
In 2022, indigenous mothers won a court order to halt construction of a new university campus and research centre on the site, a project worth some US$643 million.
Fellow activist Kwetiio, 52, says they insisted on defending the case themselves without lawyers, so that it would be “our way. No one speaks for us.”
In the middle of last year, sniffer dogs and specialised probes were used to search the vast, dilapidated buildings on the property. They managed to identify three areas of interest for excavation.
But according to McGill University and the provincial government’s Société Québécoise des Infrastructure (SQI), “no human remains have been discovered.”
The Mohawk mothers accuse the university and the government infrastructure agency of reneging on an agreement by selecting the archaeologists who did the search and then ending their work too soon.
“They have given themselves the power to direct the investigation of crimes that were possibly committed by their own employees in the past,” according to Philippe Blouin, an anthropologist assisting in the search led by the mothers.
Despite the fact that their appeal was rejected a few weeks ago, the group says it will continue its fight to reveal the truth.
“People should know history so that it doesn’t happen again,” says Kwetiio.
In recent years, Canada has opened its eyes to the atrocities of the past.
Generations of indigenous children were sent to boarding schools where they were stripped of their language, religion and identity in what a 2015 truth and reconciliation report called “cultural genocide.”
Between 1831 and 1996, some 150,000 indigenous children were taken from their homes and placed in 139 such centres. Thousands of them never returned to their communities of origin.
In May 2021, the discovery of the unmarked graves of 215 children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia sparked a national reckoning on this dark chapter in Canadian history, while prompting a search for more graves across Canada.
“It was not just boarding schools, but also hospitals, sanatoriums, churches and orphanages,” Kwetiio said.
For her, the most important thing is to shed light on what happened so that “things change” and “the harmony we had before colonialism” can be recreated.
